Reading Medieval Studies, 41 (2015): 27-51

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and

Richard III

Anne E Bailey

University of Reading

Richard III (1452-1485) died at the Battle of Bosworth, two years after

attaining the English throne. The end of Richard’s life, however, was

not the end of his story because his fame lived on, chiefly as a

consequence of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third which portrayed the

king as an evil hunchback responsible for murdering his nephews in the

Tower of London.

In 1924, the Richard III Society was established for the purpose of

‘reclaiming’ the king’s reputation and raising public awareness of the

historical, rather than the fictional, Richard.1 One of its current

members, Philippa Langley, furthered these aims in 2009 by launching

the ‘Looking for Richard’ project. The quest was to recover not only

Richard’s reputation but also his mortal remains, ‘lost’ in the aftermath

of Bosworth and the upheaval of the English Reformation.2

Following the battle at Bosworth, the king’s mutilated body had

been brought into Leicester and given a hasty burial in a Franciscan

priory, a stone’s throw from what is now the city’s Anglican Cathedral.

The Friary was demolished shortly after the Reformation and, in 1915,

the land was acquired by Leicestershire County Council. Here, beneath

what had since become a city centre car park, Richard III might have

remained indefinitely had it not been for the combined efforts of

Philippa Langley, the Richard III Society and Leicester University. In

2012 the University’s archaeological team excavated a skeleton from the

friary’s foundations. Six months later the bones were identified as those

of Richard III, and the last Plantagenet king of England shot to public

fame as ‘The King under the Car Park’.3

Plans to rebury Richard in a location more salubrious than a

council car park came to fruition in March 2015. The King’s reburial

in Leicester Cathedral was organised around a week-long celebratory

28 Anne Bailey

event, notable for its pomp and ceremony and for its extensive media

coverage. The occasion began on Sunday 22 March with a horse-drawn

funeral procession through the city’s streets and the ceremonial handing

over of Richard’s coffin to Leicester Cathedral. After a three-day public

vigil, during which over twenty thousand people filed past the King ‘in

calm repose’, came the elaborate reinterment service when Richard’s

body was lowered into a specially constructed crypt behind the High

Altar. On the final day, the new tomb – a block of limestone inscribed

with a cross and set on a dark plinth of Kilkenny stone – was revealed

to the public. The week culminated in the lighting of thousands of

candles and a spectacular firework display.

© Anne Bailey

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 29

The interest generated by Richard’s discovery and reburial

provoked much comment from the media, with public reaction

generally framed in historical terms. ‘It shows how keen we are on our

history’, was the observation of the historian and commentator, Jon

Snow, during five hours of live broadcast by Britain’s Channel Four, as

he tried to account for the large numbers of people which had

descended on the city to witness ‘The King Laid to Rest’.4 The reburial

celebrations were themselves described as ‘a moment in history’, and

most of the tourists I spoke to when I visited Leicester on 27 March

agreed with Jon Snow that they were witnessing ‘history in the making’.5

What was particularly striking about the media coverage and the

emphasis on history was the absence of any reference to another

prominent element: religion. The central location for the week was an

Anglican cathedral, and the key events were religious and presided over

by leading churchmen including Justin Welby, the Archbishop of

Canterbury, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols, representing the Catholic

Church in England and Wales. Nonetheless, the media seemed to

regard the religious setting as little more than an appropriate backdrop

for a cultural heritage event. During the Channel Four broadcasts, when

the life and times of Richard were endlessly discussed by historians such

as Helen Castor and David Starkey, much was made of recreating, and

re-enacting, the Middle Ages. Even the cathedral clergy contributed to

the spirit of medievalism by working with historians to write a reburial

service that mixed and matched liturgy from both the past and the

present.

However, no amount of secular gloss and pointed references to

history and the Middle Ages could quite cover up a strong sense of

religiosity that seemed to pervade the overall mood during the reburial

week. In addition to the televised Christian rituals in an English

cathedral, there was a strong element of spirituality in the phenomenon

Channel Four called ‘The Richard Effect’: that is, the emotional

connection to Richard III that many members of the public claimed to

feel. For those who had made the effort to travel hundreds of miles to

be in Leicester that overcast, cool March week in 2015, the reburial of

Richard III was clearly a meaningful occasion and, as will be argued, the

motives of visitors were more complex than a mere interest in history.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Richard III

phenomenon from both an anthropological and an historical

30 Anne Bailey

perspective. As a contemporary event, the reburial week in March 2015

more obviously fits into the ‘anthropology’ camp. Nine out of ten

visitors interviewed on the final day of festivities were happy to describe

their visit to Leicester as a ‘pilgrimage’, despite only half of them

asserting that they had any religious belief.6 In view of the current

popularity of pilgrimage among religious and non-religious enthusiasts,

it seems that there is much about the spectacle of Richard’s reburial to

excite anthropologists. For historians of medieval religion, however,

there is a different, but not unrelated, point of interest because the

twenty-first century treatment of, and attitudes towards, the remains of

Richard III has many of the hallmarks of medieval relic veneration. As

will be discussed, Richard’s modern journey from discovery to reburial

(or from inventio to translatio) was punctuated by a string of medieval

cultic motifs.

What follows uses the case study of Richard III in Leicester to

combine anthropological and historical approaches in new ways.

Apparent similarities between phenomena flourishing in different times

and contexts must be treated with care, and one of the problems with

comparing Leicester’s archaeological find to a medieval relic is that

Richard is not, and never has been, considered a saint. However, the

article argues that problematic cross-cultural comparisons are not

without value because it is within such messy disjunctions – where the

present and past just fail to meet – that the most fertile research

opportunities often lie. First, however, the relationship between history

and anthropology needs further discussion because historians and

anthropologists have not always reacted positively to the idea of

collaboration.

History and Anthropology

In 1987 the American anthropologist, Bernard Cohn, published a

collection of essays entitled ‘An Anthropologist among the Historians’.7

The first essay is a playful ethnographic study of a strange class of people

he had encountered during his fieldwork in India: the historians.

According to Cohn, the historian is a very different species from his

academic cousin, the anthropologist. Whereas the historian’s preferred

habitat is the library or archive, the anthropologist’s is out in the field,

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 31

and whereas the historian is ‘regular in his work habits’ and well-

organised, the anthropologist works in ‘great bursts’ and lectures from

notes scribbled on the back of dirty envelopes.8

Cohn’s purpose in polarising, and satirizing, historians and

anthropologists was not to propagate stereotypes, but rather to

champion the notion of their collaboration. Despite historians’ and

anthropologists’ differences, he envisaged a productive meeting of

minds in the methodological shift we now know as the ‘cultural turn’,

and his series of 1987 essays promoted the relatively new sub-discipline

of ‘historical anthropology’ which was gaining popularity at the time.9

Historical anthropology, endorsed so enthusiastically by Cohn,

combined cultural anthropology with ‘bottom-up’ social history. In the

late 1970s and 1980s it produced innovative micro-studies of historical

culture, such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976),

Natalie Zemon Davies’ Martin Guerre (1983), and Robert Darnton’s

The Great Cat Massacre (1984). It was an approach enthusiastically

adopted by medievalists, perhaps most famously by Emmanuel Le Roy

Ladurie in his Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village

1294-1324 (1975) and by Jean Claude Schmitt in The Holy Greyhound:

Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century (1979), but

also by other Annales-influenced scholars such as Jacques le Goff and

Aaron Gurevich.10 Although these works and their authors have

remained popular, the approach itself has since fallen out of favour.

Nonetheless, anthropological influences remain, and a wide variety of

anthropological ideas have seeped almost imperceptibly into many

areas of history scholarship.

For medievalists, the greatest impact of anthropology on scholarly

method has probably been the ritual analysis of religious and social

practice informed, for example, by ideas taken from Emile Durkheim,

Marcel Maus and Mary Douglas. Conceptualising social processes

around the binary model of inclusion/exclusion has, for instance,

proved a popular approach.11 Social ‘exclusionists’ have interpreted

negative phenomena – such as witchcraft and heresy – in terms of ritual

pollution while social ‘inclusionists’ view positive phenomena – such as

saints’ cults – as community bonding mechanisms.12 Tending towards

essentialism, however, the ‘ritual turn’ has not been without its critics.13

32 Anne Bailey

One anthropological topic which particularly attracted cross-

discipline fertilisation in the late twentieth century was pilgrimage. This

was largely due to the popularity of the British anthropologist Victor

Turner, whose book, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978),

captured the imagination of historians. Co-authored with his wife, Edith,

Image and Pilgrimage adapted Arnold van Gennep’s generic ‘rites-of-

passage’ theory of ritual for Christian pilgrimage and introduced

medievalists to the appealing concepts of communitas and liminality

which continue to have scholarly currency today. Nonetheless, Turner’s

ability to bridge the history-anthropology divide was short-lived. When

structuralism gave way to postmodernism in the 1990s, Turner’s one-

size-fits-all theories were discredited by historians, and the tide turned

once more against anthropology.

Turning from the field of history to anthropology, the 1990s saw a

parallel move away from Turner as the study of contemporary

pilgrimage entered a deconstructuralist phase. In Britain and America

a new generation of anthropologists attempted to open up the topic to

a wider range of themes and disciplines. Edited collections of essays

provocatively entitled Contesting the Sacred and Reframing Pilgrimage,

together with articles such as ‘Communitas Reconsidered’ or ‘Do you

Believe in Pilgrimage?’ confidently proclaimed that they were branching

out beyond Turner and attempting something radical and different.14

Postmodern in their outlook and eschewing the grand narrative, the

British anthropologists Simon Coleman, John Eade and Michael

Sallnow were among those who paved the way for the new academic

subject of ‘pilgrimage studies’ – now promoted at British universities

such as York and Lancaster – which embraces all aspects of a topic now

more widely interpreted than in the past.

One characteristic of this revisionist movement in pilgrimage

anthropology has been a push towards a multidisciplinary approach. To

a certain extent this aim has been successful: today anthropologists

mingle with medievalists, art historians, archaeologists, tourist scholars

and theologians at pilgrimage conferences, and they all happily cohabit

between the covers of academic volumes.15 However, although

multidisciplinary, pilgrimage studies is often far from interdisciplinary.

It is striking that there is rarely any appreciable overlap between the

work of historians and anthropologists; it is generally accepted that

historians keep to their realm and anthropologists stay in theirs.16

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 33

In general, then, medievalists and anthropologists still tend to use

each other’s discipline in a limited and hesitant way. Bernard Cohn’s

hope for a profitable relationship between historians and

anthropologists has come to very little. Although, no doubt, many

historians and anthropologists are content with this state of affairs, the

aim of this article is to propose an alternative view and to argue that

engaging in anthropological theory and practice could be an

academically rewarding exercise for historians, and particularly for

medievalists conducting research on pilgrimage and saints’ cults. In

order to examine such possibilities, however, we must first return to

Leicester and Richard III.

Richard III in Leicester, 2015

As the television cameras gathered outside Leicester Cathedral

ahead of Richard’s reburial service on 26 March 2015 the Channel Four

presenter, Jon Snow, admitted to a moment of perplexity. ‘It’s hard to

make sense of’, he told his viewers.17 This remark illustrates that the

standard explanation for all the excitement – the British love of history

– needs to be queried. It urges us to look elsewhere to make sense of

the outflow of public emotion directed towards Richard’s relics. This is

where combining anthropological and historical enquiry can be

insightful, and not least because Richard’s recent posthumous fame

seems to have underlying religious elements which hint at relic

veneration from an earlier time.18

The similarities between Richard’s remains and a medieval relic

begin with their inventio: the surprise finding of a saint’s bones which,

in medieval hagiography, signalled the beginning of a cult. As was often

the case in the Middle Ages, Richard’s inventio was prompted by a

vision. This was not a heavenly vision as in the medieval model – an

ordinary mortal being given instruction in a dream on where to find the

remains of a buried saint – but an inspirational vision in the form of

Philippa Langley’s unwavering faith that Richard could, and should, be

found.19 Inventio motifs continued in modern-day Leicester when, in

common with numerous medieval hagiographical accounts, the

discovery of Richard’s skeleton was proclaimed a miracle: ‘a million to

one chance’, according to Richard Buckley who headed the

34 Anne Bailey

archaeological investigation.20 Confirmation of the relics’ identity was

another important moment shared across the centuries. This was

achieved by divine revelation in the medieval centuries, but cutting edge

science proved just as revelatory in the twenty-first when Richard was

identified by matching his mitochondrial DNA to a living relative.

© Anne Bailey

One of the most curious cultic motifs to translate itself to the

present day concerns the fate of Richard’s original grave. The

veneration of abandoned saints’ graves is a well-known medieval

Christian practice, providing a secondary pilgrim focus in addition to

the main shrine for many English cults.21 Seemingly following on in this

tradition, Leicester City Council not only preserved the Greyfriar s

excavation site but also turned it into a tourist attraction: the hole where

Richard’s body had once laid is now the central focus of the new

Richard III Visitor Centre where it can be viewed through a glass floor.

According to the promotional literature, the grave area has been

designed as a ‘contemplative space’ with seats enabling visitors to sit and

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 35

‘reflect’, suggesting an unexpected blurring between the boundaries of

heritage and religion, as well as that between the past and present.22

As with Richard’s grave, so with his new tomb in Leicester

Cathedral: although strikingly modern in appearance it also points

towards medieval relic veneration in being located immediately behind

the High Altar, the place usually reserved for saints in English churches

before the Reformation.23 As was often the case in the central Middle

Ages, the space within the church in modern Leicester was expanded

in order to accommodate the new tomb and expected influx of visitors.24

Architectural additions such as a new chapel abutting the tomb are also

suggestive of a medieval cult, as is the commission of a stained-glass

window commemorating Richard’s life and death which is strongly

reminiscent of the ‘Becket’ windows at Canterbury Cathedral marking

St Thomas’s own 1220 reburial, or ‘translation’.25

Despite these parallels to medieval relic veneration, the Anglican

Church at Leicester made it clear that Richard was being honoured as

an ordinary mortal rather than a saint, and that his burial privileges

signified his earthly status among men rather than his celestial standing

with God. For example, Richard’s reinterment was a ‘reburial’ (not a

‘translation’), his resting place is a tomb (not a shrine) and there was no

liturgy of intercession. If Richard’s devotees felt compelled to ‘talk’ to

Richard, Protestant doctrine on the afterlife determined that he would

not be talking back.

As if to emphasise Richard’s non-saintly status, the Leicester clergy

portrayed him as a kind of Everyman. The Bishop of Leicester, the

Right Reverend Tim Stevens, told his congregation during the Service

of Reinterment that Richard represented ‘all human life’, particularly in

his courageous endurance of disability, bereavement and loss. This, in

fact, was the Church’s explanation for the ‘Richard Effect’. It was

Richard’s suffering, said Tim Stevens, which helped to forge a ‘deep

connection’ between the fifteenth-century king and those who came to

Leicester in March 2015 ‘bearing their own burdens of grief’.26

The visitors I spoke to in the Cathedral Gardens on 27 March had

not, of course, come to Leicester to venerate a saint: parallels to

medieval relic devotion did not occur to them and even the ardent

Richardian among my interviewees understood the occasion as a

heritage, rather than a religious, event. Nonetheless, in talking to a

variety of people as they queued to see the newly revealed tomb on the

36 Anne Bailey

final day of Richard’s reburial week, I was struck by the fact that Tim

Stevens’s religious message resonated with public feeling in ways which

would have been recognisable in the Middle Ages when the laity was

encouraged to interact with their local saint as they might a close friend.27

Thus the majority of those I talked to on 27 March spoke about Richard

with feeling and empathy, echoing Channel Four’s repeated claim that

people had ‘taken Richard to their hearts’. She felt close to Richard

because he was an ‘underdog’, said one of my interviewees, because he

was ‘devastated’ by the death of his son, said another. ‘Sympathy’ for

Richard was also mentioned, as was his ‘personality’, and indignation

was expressed that Richard was ‘betrayed and usurped’. Visitors to

Richard’s tomb were clearly not only objective consumers of history.

© Anne Bailey

The response of the general public to Richard III in March 2015

clearly problematizes the conceptual boundaries between history and

religion, and between the past and the present. The remainder of the

article draws on anthropological theory and my own fieldwork to

examine these awkward cross-currents further and to suggest how

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 37

anthropological approaches might be harnessed to gain a deeper

understanding of the medieval cult of relics.

‘History Meets the Present’28

During Richard’s reburial week in March 2015 there were several

distinct aspects of Richard’s posthumous identity which seemed to

account for the modern ‘devotion’ to a medieval king. The first of these,

and perhaps the most prominent, was the media’s explanation that –

motivated by a love of history – the public was attracted to Richard as a

historical figure.

There are, however, difficulties with this interpretation as has

already been indicated. Perhaps most strikingly, the Richard Effect

tended to conceptually collapse the distinction between past and

present, thus negating any sense of time and history. The popular idea

that Richard was being given the funeral he had been denied in 1485

helped to generate the impression that 1485 had been catapulted – and

Richard with it – into 2015.29 Past and present seemed to converge in

many minds: in his reburial sermon Tim Stevens, for example, spoke

of Richard ‘stepping out of the pages of history’. The ‘heritage’ aspect

of the week’s events – which sought to replicate many ‘medieval’

features of Richard’s time – even led the historian, Helen Castor, to talk

about ‘the fifteenth century bursting into the twenty -first.’30

Like the novelist Philippa Gregory – who told Channel Four

viewers that ‘the past is really here and now’ – the tourists I spoke to in

Leicester uncritically accepted the notion that history could be

experienced in the present. One woman told me that she enjoyed

witnessing history played out ‘in real time … in the flesh’. Notionally

cancelling out the distancing effect of time closed the emotional gap

between Richard and his modern devotees; bringing the past into the

present meant that, for many, Richard was less a distant historical figure

than a knowable friend. ‘Richard came alive as a person this week,’ one

woman told me. As we have already seen, the general public seemed

peculiarly receptive to the idea that it was possible to have a meaningful,

even personal, relationship with Richard and it seems that blurring the

historical past with the living present was an important element in

creating a sense of connection with a long-dead king.

38 Anne Bailey

Synchronic historical viewpoints are, of course, not new. Religious

ritual, particularly in the Christian tradition, works on the principle that

re-enacting moments of history allows participants to re-experience

them in the present.31 ‘Asserting that the past is now, too,’ is a recognised

feature of modern pilgrimage and, in the Middle Ages, the same idea

allowed historical or pseudo-historical figures – such as saints – to

remain relevant and accessible well after death.32 The modern Anglican

approach to Richard III is, then, not without precedent.

It is instructive to look more closely at how ‘history’ was brought

into the present in Leicester during Richard’s reburial week. The time-

slip effect was mainly achieved by inserting symbolic references to the

Middle Ages into the modern proceedings, sometimes producing

striking juxtapositions such as the funeral cortege which included a

motorized police escort and two armoured knights. Then there were

more compelling medieval adaptations such as Richard’s reburial

service, taken from a genuine fifteenth-century reburial liturgy but

modernised, translated into English and purged of most of its Catholic

traits. The service itself was a patchwork of hybrid medieval-modern

elements: psalms sung to modern compositions, the medieval Vulgate

bible placed on the modern coffin, and Judith Bingham’s anthem set to

the words of the thirteenth-century mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg. To

many members of the public, the reburial service – with its combination

of the familiar and unfamiliar – seemed ‘authentic’ and ‘what Richard

would have wanted.’33

The fact that these fusions of cultures did not appear particularly

incongruous to Richard’s fans can be explained by modern theories of

authenticity which argue that what tourists accept as historically

‘authentic’ usually corresponds to their own expectations of the past.34

These expectations are shaped by cultural assumptions and are often

met by including anachronistic elements in heritage events: welding the

alien past to the familiar present is known to enhance a sense of

‘authenticity’. Heritage professionals understand the value of fulfilling

tourists’ expectations of authenticity, and they occasionally privilege

authentic ‘truth’ over historical ‘truth’ in a way which has resonance with

the religious ‘truths’ promoted by medieval hagiographers in their

rendering of saints’ lives.35

The important point here is that ‘authenticity’, when defined as an

intuitive sense of what the past should have been rather than what it

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 39

actually was, has emotional currency which is a valuable asset for the

modern tourist industry. Modern heritage scholarship also examines

tourists’ emotional responses to museum artefacts. Those with

‘numinous’ value are often those which generate feelings of ethnic,

regional, national or religious identity.36 In this respect it is interesting

that among my interviewees on 27 March were two local visitors, both

of whom not only expressed stronger feelings towards Richard than

those who had travelled some distance, but who also referred to Richard

in the present tense. ‘He’s our King’, were the words of one man who

lived five miles away. As museum curators and heritage professionals

realise, visitor experience is enriched when tourists feel personal

connectedness or emotional attachment to a historical object or to a

specific historical individual, and one way to achieve this is to lessen the

time divide between history and the present.37

The ‘heritage’ lens, then, is a useful tool for analysing the emotion

responses felt towards historical artefacts and long-dead strangers, and

may therefore also suggest ways in which medieval communities related

to their own past. It might seem anachronistic to view medieval relic

veneration within the sphere of modern cultural tourism, but medieval

saints (ostensibly historical figures) were also heritage products, and

medieval relics (historical artefacts) embodied myths of identity and

fostered a sense of belonging just as museum ‘relics’ do in the modern

world.38 Imagining a medieval saint as a heritage commodity as well as a

religious relic not only points to new research possibilities but it also

prompts us to think more deeply about the relationship between history

and religion in the Middle Ages.

Contested Discourses

A second explanation for Richard’s posthumous popularity

proffered by the media during the reburial week was Richard’s status as

a dead king. Julian Fellowes (screenwriter, royalist and member of the

House of Lords), for example, referred to the events in Leicester as ‘a

celebration of monarchy’, while Jon Snow hailed the reburial as ‘a royal

event’ and his fellow Channel Four commentator, Krishnan Guru-

Murthy, described it as ‘a service fit for a medieval king’.39 Fully

embracing the monarchy theme, Channel Four’s coverage of the three

40 Anne Bailey

church services – intercut with commentary and interviews – was

structured in the style of televised British state funerals.40 Although not

exactly ignoring the fact that burying an English king in a cathedral five

centuries after his death was unprecedented, the televised event was

presented to the public as part of a royal funerary tradition.

On the surface, the public accepted this interpretation of Richard’s

posthumous popularity: half of my interviewees affirmed that it was the

fact that Richard was an ‘anointed English king’ that made him worthy

of honour. However, when questioned more closely, my respondents

admitted that it was not so much Richard’s royal status that made him a

figure of interest and ‘respect’, as his human qualities. Richard as a

noble, knight or even a peasant would have been equally as interesting,

they all conceded. It was Richard’s ‘personality’ which attracted her, said

one woman, the fact that he was a controversial figure, said another. In

this instance, the general public seemed more attuned to the Cathedral’s

‘religious’ discourse of Richard the ordinary man, rather than the

patriotic idea of Richard the British monarch.

This discrepancy between the media-promoted ‘public’ discourse

on the one hand and private sentiment on the other nicely fits into the

‘contestation’ approach of post-Turnerian pilgrimage anthropology.41

However, it also has relevance for the medieval cult of saints which had

its own official medium in hagiography. Medieval hagiography,

principally in the form of saints’ lives and miracles, ostensibly reported

the testimonies of witnesses and, like Channel Four, transmitted the

cultural assumptions of the day. Medievalists often debate to what extent

these sources were biased, and there is nothing new in suggesting that

there were mismatches between the public cultural narrative on the one

hand and what ordinary people ‘really’ thought on the other.42

However, the modern case study of Richard III offers medievalists

something more than a confirmation that official narratives do not

always speak for ordinary people. It provides us with the opportunity to

gain some understanding of the mechanics of how this medieval media

distortion might have worked. In modern-day Leicester, for example, it

was not so much that Channel Four, the BBC and other news outlets

purposely misrepresented public feeling, but rather that – when

interviewed – the public’s first reaction was to repeat views current in

the media, and the views current in the media were not always directly

sourced from the public, as we have seen in the case of Channel Four.

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 41

The influence of the media on the public was particularly evident from

the language and vocabulary of my interviewees. Those who had been

watching the television coverage repeated expressions and words they

had heard in the broadcasts: for example, ‘paying respects’ and

‘honouring’ Richard came up again and again, and several of those I

spoke to used the term ‘anointed king’, again a phrase promoted by

official sources and popularized by the media. In this instance, the

public discourse was less official propaganda than cultural assumptions

reinforced by people’s tendency to reiterate the safe, ‘authorised’ line

when questioned by a stranger representing a British university. In the

same way we might imagine that ‘what the people bring’ to medieval

hagiographers in the form of pilgrims’ tales was not necessarily always

what they thought.43

Examining the ways in which various discourses surrounding

Richard III’s reburial influenced one another and occasionally

conflicted, then, is not only relevant for anthropologists. It seems likely

that similar processes were present in the Middle Ages informing – or

misinforming – our understanding of saints’ cults. Although we cannot

know exactly what was in the minds of medieval informants,

anthropological observations at least provide a warning to historians

tempted to use witness testimonies recorded by religious officials as a

means for assessing motivations for pilgrimage.44 As the Richard III case

study has demonstrated, even in modern contexts the underlying

motivations for men’s and women’s actions are not always easy to

discern.

Cult of the Dead

Channel Four’s preferred explanation for the Richard Effect, then,

was the public’s love of history and its fascination with monarchy.

However, as we have seen, a survey of visitors at Leicester Cathedral on

27 March indicates that Richard’s historic and royal qualities are less

important to the general public than his human ones. Connected to this

personalized response was the need, strongly felt and expressed by all

those I met, to give Richard a Christian burial. Each of my interviewees,

for example, thought that Richard’s funeral in a cathedral was important

because it would have pleased him.45 The idea of a secular alternative

42 Anne Bailey

was met with disapproval, even by those who claimed to have no

religious belief. Indeed, four out of ten said that they would not have

come to Leicester had Richard’s skeleton been displayed as a historical

artefact in a museum.

All those I talked to had Christian backgrounds and this no doubt

goes some way in explaining their frequently asserted belief that it was

‘fitting’ to show ‘respect’ and ‘honour’ to the dead Richard by reburying

him in a Christian place of worship.46 One of my interviewees, a self-

proclaimed atheist, told me, ‘all humans should have a dignified ending

no matter who they are’. In some respects it seems that Richard’s status

as a famous historical person or as a monarch was considered less

important than the simple fact that he was dead, in need of burial and

‘deserved’, in the words of one of my interviewees, ‘a proper send off.’

Richard’s posthumous celebrity status parallels, in many ways, the

constructed nature of sanctity in the Middle Ages. As with medieval

saints, Richard III’s kingship and his fame as a historic figure did not

automatically single him out as a member of the ‘special dead’; this

privilege was instead engineered by local sponsors and the enthusiastic

support of the general public.47 Medieval sainthood, subject to human

whim and favour, was constructed along similar lines, and witnessing the

twenty-first century response to Richard’s posthumous persona raises

the possibility that there was a very thin line between venerating saints

and honouring dead celebrities in the minds of the medieval laity. In

the medieval world where saintly identities were often contested and

saints’ tombs lay alongside those of monarchs, bishops and lay

benefactors, it is pertinent to ask how well did ordinary parishioners

really understand the liturgical and theological differences between the

sanctified and the non-sanctified dead.

Would it be useful, for example, to imagine a wider ‘cult of the

dead’ for the Middle Ages, perhaps encompassing a hierarchy of

deceased luminaries headed by saints and martyrs but also including

monarchs, bishops and members of the local aristocracy? Rather than

producing a conventional sacred/profane binary of opposition which

divides saints from everyone else, such a theoretical reappraisal would

realign saints on a graded continuum of the memorialised dead, a

model in keeping with postmodern theory which favours a spectrum of

difference. Given that the Middle Ages organised its terrestrial and

celestial inhabitants into ordered, hierarchical ranks, it may well be that

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 43

scholars are missing the wider picture by studying saints’ cults as an

isolated religious phenomenon.

Positioning the ordinary dead in the same conceptual category as

the special dead is, in fact, something that pilgrimage anthropology has

been doing since the 1990s. Ethnologies of present-day secular

pilgrimage have observed that gatherings of devotees at the graves of

celebrities, such as Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison, and political heroes

such as Lenin and Chairman Mao, have many of the same features as

pilgrimages to religious shrines.48 In view of the similarities between

medieval saint veneration and the 2015 attraction to Richard III’s relics,

we might profitably set the Richard Effect and its associated phenomena

within the ‘secular pilgrimage’ orbit.

Indeed, the idea that pilgrimage need not be religiously motivated

has led to a widening of the topic within anthropology, which now

incorporates secular heritage subsets such as roots pilgrimage, war-grave

pilgrimage, and political pilgrimage.49 If applied to the Middle Ages, this

approach might alert medievalists to the probability that many

ostensibly modern trends under the secular pilgrimage umbrella were

also present in an earlier period. One example is the recent popularity

of ‘dark’ heritage sites: places connected to suffering and violent death.

‘Thanatourism’ – a term coined in the mid 1990s – is often associated

with cemeteries and churchyards, but also refers to atrocities such as the

transatlantic slave trade, the Holocaust and the ‘nine-eleven’ terrorist

attack on the Manhattan Trade Centre in New York.50

In this respect, we might argue that the medieval cult of martyrs –

with its focus on graves and the veneration of relics pertaining to be

instruments of torture – is, in many ways, a forerunner of modern

thanatourism. Visitors to late-medieval Canterbury, for instance, would

have been taken on a tour of the cathedral and shown the exact spot

where Thomas Becket was martyred.51 Perhaps not coincidently, similar

‘dark’ aspects of Richard III were commemorated at the beginning of

Leicester’s reburial week as people gathered for services at the site of

Richard’s death and toured other places associated with his last fatal

day. It would seem that now, as in the Middle Ages, the general public

feel drawn to places symbolising death, and find them emotionally

compelling. As studies of modern thanatourism have shown, the

attraction to dark heritage cannot alone be explained with reference to

history or religion. Other forces are at play. Motives for visiting the

44 Anne Bailey

graves and death places of strangers are said to range from morbid

curiosity and recreational diversion to remembrance and education,

and the need to understand, and come to terms with, ‘an emotionally

charged past’.52 Moreover, thanatourism often encompasses historical

events seen as ‘difficult’ and emotive, and heritage managers exploit,

downplay or negotiate these at their peril, and are sometimes criticised

for presenting history to reflect hegemonic or nationalistic ideals.53 It

may not be the case that all these aspects of modern thanatourism have

relevance for all medieval cults, but in focusing on the emotional power

of the past and on history as ‘interpretation’ rather than fact, heritage

scholarship and pilgrimage anthropology offers clues to the ways in

which medieval people encountered and reproduced their own sense

of the past through the use of relics.

The secular anthropological approach to pilgrimage, then, throws

up some interesting methodological possibilities for medievalists. First,

it suggests that, in order to understand how medieval cults functioned,

we need not necessarily consider the phenomenon within the tight

parameters of religion: as recognised by anthropologists, pilgrimages are

‘multifunctional journeys’.54 Second, ‘pilgrimage’ might be used as an

analytical tool for examining a wider variety of medieval practices,

behaviours and experiences. It may be instructive, for example, to

discover whether the social, cultural, political and psychological forces

at work in pilgrimage were also present in other activities such as

commemorating the dead or remembering, and recording, historical

events. Anthropological approaches make it possible to probe the little

explored relationship between history and religion in medieval culture,

offering medievalists new insights into the emotional attachments to past

times, places and people that relic cults so strongly generated and

fostered.

Conclusion

In examining the psychology behind modern cultic behaviour,

anthropologists have looked beyond the purely ‘religious’ aspect of

pilgrimage, and their observations go far in attempting to explain the

cult-like devotion shown towards Richard III in twenty-first century

Leicester. Given that the public reaction to Richard III chimes so

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 45

strikingly with relic veneration in the Middle Ages, it would seem that

anthropology also has much to offer medievalists seeking new ways of

understanding the relationship between relics and their devotees.

However, here we must be careful of cross-cultural leaps of faith into

the dark because the two phenomena are not equal. Richard is not a

saint, and post-Reformation England is very different from fifteenth-

century Leicester.

However, it is the fact of Richard not being a saint that arouses

curiosity and inspires academic enquiry. ‘Hard to make sense of’, the

events of March 2015 and the public’s reaction to them provoke

comment, bafflement, speculation and even controversy. In this

instance, the similarities between comparable cultural phenomena

seem less important than their differences. Lying somewhere between

historical artefact and saint – between history and religion, between past

and present, and between the secular and the sacred – the relics of

Richard III defy neat categories of understanding. They challenge us as

historians to step beyond the familiar structures of our own discipline

and, I would argue, nudge us towards new, creative ways of

conceptualising the medieval world.

© Anne Bailey

46 Anne Bailey

Notes

1 ‘Mission Statement’, Richard III Society website,

http://www.richardiii.net/aboutus.php. Accessed 23/09/2015.

2 See http://looking-for-richard.webs.com.

3 M. Morris and R. Buckley, Richard III: The King Under the Car Park (Leicester, University of Leicester Archaeological Service, 2013).

4 Channel Four Television Corporation Limited, Richard III: The Burial of the King (26 March, 2015); Channel Four, The King Laid to Rest (26

March, 2015).

5 Jon Snow, Burial of the King; survey conducted by the author in Leicester

on 27 March 2015.

6 In the survey conducted by the author in Leicester on 27 March, five out

of ten respondents replied in the affirmative when asked whether they had

any religious belief, three said ‘no’, one expressed ambivalence and one

told me he was a ‘relapsed’ Lutheran.

7 B.S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (rev. edn Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990).

8 Cohn, ‘An Anthropologist among the Historians’, in his Anthropologist among the Historians, pp. 1-17.

9 See especially, Cohn, ‘Towards an Anthropological History’, and

‘Anthropology and History in the 1980s: Towards a Rapprochement’, in

his Anthropologist among the Historians, pp. 42-7, 50-77. For historical

anthropology, also see A. Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Polity, 1992).

10 For example, J. le Goff, ‘Ecclesiastic Culture and Folklore in the Middle

Ages: Saint Marcellus of Paris and the Dragon’, in his Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. A. Goldhammer (London and Chicago,

University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 159-88; Gurevich, Historical Anthropology.

11 For example, D. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism and Islam (1000-1150), trans. G.R. Edwards (Ithaca,

Cornell University Press, 1998); B.A. Hanawalt, Rituals of Inclusion and Exclusion: Hierarchy and Marginalisation in Medieval London, in her Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 18-34; N. Orme, ‘Access and

Exclusion: Exeter Cathedral, 1300-1540’ in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages, ed. P. Horden (Donington, Shaun Tyas, 2007), pp. 267-86.

12 For an example of the former, see R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 47

(Oxford, Blackwell, 1987). For an example of the latter see P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago,

Chicago University Press, 1981; repr. 1982).

13 P. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001).

14 Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. J.

Eade and M.J. Sallnow (London, Routledge, 1991); Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, ed. S. Coleman and J. Eade (London, Routledge,

2004); M.J. Sallnow, ‘Communitas Reconsidered: The Sociology of

Andean Pilgrimage’, Man, 16 (1981): 163-82; Simon Coleman, ‘Do you

Believe in Pilgrimage? Communitas, Contestation and Beyond’,

Anthropological Theory, 2 (2002): 355-68.

15 Recent ‘interdisciplinary’ pilgrimage studies conferences include The Sacred Journeys: Pilgrimage and Beyond Project (University of Oxford, 3–

5 July, 2015), and Assessing Pilgrimage Studies Today Interdisciplinary Symposium (University of York, 5-6 July, 2014). Interdisciplinary volumes

include Pilgrimage: Past and Present in the World Religions, ed. S.

Coleman and J. Elsner (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2002);

Redefining Pilgrimage: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Pilgrimages, ed. A.M. Pazos (Ashgate, Farnham, 2014).

16 A good example is the Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals, Past and Present project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

(underway at the time of writing) which employs separate medievalists and

anthropologists as researchers to investigate past and present pilgrimage in

four England cathedrals. Details of this project can be found at

http://www.pilgrimageandcathedrals.ac.uk.

17 Channel Four, Burial of the King.

18 For a fuller discussion of what follows, see A.E. Bailey, ‘A Medieval Relic?’,

History Today, 65.8 (2015): 11-17.

19 ‘I just became convinced that his burial place was there and still waiting to

be found.’ Philippa Langley, Looking for Richard III,

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/richard-iii-the-new-

evidence/videos/all/looking-for-richard-iii. Accessed 24/09/2015.

20 Channel Four, Burial of the King. This quotation was also widely reported

in the media.

21 For medieval examples, see Bailey, ‘A Medieval Relic?’: 13.

22 King Richard III Visitor Centre website, http://www.kriii.com/king-richard-

iii-visitor-centre-opens-26-july, accessed 24/09/2015. The Head of Arts and

Museum in Leicester reportedly described it as ‘an evocative space’

allowing ‘visitors to reflect’: N. Housley, ‘Preview of the Richard III Visitor

Centre’, http://www2.le.ac.uk/news/blog/2014-archive-1/july/university-

historian-gets-early-peek-of-richard-iii-visitor-centre, posted 24 July 2014.

48 Anne Bailey

23 J. Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Princeton and Woodbridge, Boydell,

2011), pp. 211-12.

24 For the architecture of pilgrimage in English churches see, for example,

Crook, English Medieval Shrines and B. Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2001).

25 For the details of these changes, see the Cathedral’s ‘Brief for Architects’,

published online http://www.leicester.anglican.org/site-

includes/uploads/wygwam/Architects%20Brief%20for%20Grave%20of%2

0Richard%20III%20130313.pdf. For an image of the proposed window at

Leicester, see Bailey, A Medieval Relic?: 27. For the Becket windows, see

M.H. Caviness, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury

(London, Oxford University Press, 1981).

26 Tim Stevens’s sermon given at the Service of the Reinterment of the Remains of King Richard III, 26 March 2015. A transcript of this sermon

can be found on the Leicester Cathedral website,

http://leicestercathedral.org/cathedral-sermons/king-richard-iii-service-

reinterment.

27 For saints as friends and companions, see Brown, Cult of the Saints, pp.

50-68; A.E. Bailey, ‘Friends and Neighbours in High-Medieval England: A

Hagiographical Perspective’, in The Experience of Neighbourhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bronach Kane and Simon

Sandall (Farnham, Ashgate, forthcoming).

28 Rt Revd Tim Stevens, Service of the Reinterment. 29 For example, implicit in Tim Steven’s statement that Richard’s bones were

receiving, in their reburial, the ‘dignity and honour denied to them in

death’. http://leicestercathedral.org/cathedral-sermons/king-richard-iii-

service-reinterment

30 Channel Four, Burial of the King.

31 As, for example, highlighted by ‘myth-and-ritual’ theorists. See A.E. Bailey,

‘Peter Brown and Victor Turner Revisited: Anthropological Approaches

to Latin Miracle Narratives in the Medieval West’, in Contextualizing Miracles, ed. M. Mesley and L. Wilson (Oxford, Medium Ævum, 2014),

pp. 30-2.

32 A. Morinis, ‘The Territory of the Anthropology of Pilgrimage’ in his Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (London, Greenwood Press,

1992), p. 27 (pp. 1-23). For a modern pilgrimage example see S. Coleman,

‘Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at

Walsingham’, in E. Badone and S.R. Roseman, Intersecting Journeys: the Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism (Urbana, University of Illinois

Press, 2004), pp. 52-67.

33 This phrase was frequently used by my interviewees. For more on this

theme, see Bailey, ‘Medieval Relic?’, p. 16.

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 49

34 For theories of authenticity see, for example, H. Pak, Heritage Tourism

(Abingdon, Routledge, 2014), pp. 60-7; N. Wang, ‘Rethinking Authenticity

in Tourism Experience’ in Annals of Tourism Research, 26.3 (1999): 349-

70; C.M. Cameron and J.B. Gatewood, ‘Seeking Numinous Experiences

in the Unremembered Past’, in Ethnology, 42.1 (2003): 55-71. Also see H.

Park, Heritage Tourism (Abingdon, Routledge, 2014), pp. 60-7.

35 See, for example, F.F.J. Schouten, ‘Heritage as Historical Reality’, in

Heritage, Tourism and Society, ed. D.T. Herbert (Pinter, London, 1995),

pp. 21-31 (pp. 23-5).

36 For example, R.P. Maines and J.J. Glynn, ‘Numinous Objects’, in The Public Historian, 15.1 (1993): 8-5.

37 For example, M. Shackley, Managing Sacred Sites: Service Provision and Visitor Experience (Thomson, London, 2001), p. 166; P. Basu, ‘Route

Metaphors of “Roots-Tourism” in the Scottish Highland Diaspora’, in

Reframing Pilgrimage, ed. Coleman and Eade, pp. 150-174 (p. 171); T.

Walter, ‘War Grave Pilgrimage’, in ‘Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, ed. I.

Reader and T. Walter (Macmillan; London, 1993), pp. 63-91 (p. 73).

38 For the Middle Ages, see Brown, Cult of the Saints. For numinous museum

objects as ‘relics’, see Maines and Glynn, ‘Numinous Objects’, p. 8. For

modern examples, see G. Greenia, ‘Pilgrimage and the American Myth’,

in Redefining Pilgrimage, ed. Pazos pp. 47-70; H. Mitchell, ‘”Being There”:

British Mormons and the History Trail’, in Reframing Pilgrimage, ed.

Coleman and Eade, pp. 26-44; Jill Dubisch, ‘“Heartland of America”:

Memory, Motion and the (Re)construction of History on a Motorbike

Pilgrimage’, in Reframing Pilgrimage, ed. Coleman and Eade, pp. 105-32.

39 Channel Four, Burial of the King.

40 Service of Reception (22 March, 2015), Service of the Reinterment of the Remains of King Richard III (26 March 2015) and Service of Reveal of the Tomb and Celebration for King Richard III (27 March, 2015).

41 For example, see Coleman, ‘Do you believe in pilgrimage?’. 42 The extent to which the laity’s oral reports were shaped by medieval

hagiography is discussed, for example, in J.M. Smith, ‘Oral and Written:

Saints, Miracles and Relics in Brittany c850-1250’, Speculum, 65.2 (1990):

309-43; R. Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia and Oxford, University

of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), passim; L.A. Craig, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden, Brill,

2009), 79-130; G. Signori, ‘The Miracle Kitchen and Its Ingredients: A

Methodical and Critical Approach to Marian Shrine Wonders (10th to

13th Centuries), Hagiographica, 3 (1996): 279-303.

43 The quotation is from R. Koopmans, ‘What the People Bring’, in her

Wonderful to Relate, pp. 112-38.

50 Anne Bailey

44 Pilgrimage motivation in the Middle Ages is discussed, for example, in J.

Ure, Pilgrimage: the Great Adventure of the Middle Ages (New York,

Carroll & Graf, 2006), pp. 5-16; Hopper, To Be a Pilgrim: The Medieval Pilgrimage Experience (Stroud, Sutton, 2002), pp. 7-11. Women’s

motivations are often of particular interest: see, for example, Craig,

Wandering Women, pp. 92-4, 97-128; S.S. Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (London,

Routledge, 2000), pp. 16-42; S. Hopper, Mothers, Mystics and Merrymakers: Medieval Women Pilgrims (Stroud, Sutton, 2006), pp. 1-13.

45 Six out of ten interviewees explicitly talked about a Christian burial being

‘important’ to Richard, four said it was fitting because he was a Christian.

Only two of these also mentioned kingship.

46 The majority were English; two were American.

47 For the ‘special dead’, see Brown, Cult of the Saints, pp. 69-85.

48 E. Doss, ‘Rock and Roll Pilgrims: Reflections on Ritual, Religiosity and

Race at Graceland’, in Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred, ed. P.J. Margry (Amsterdam, Amsterdam

University Press, 2008), pp. 123-42; P.J. Margry, ‘The Pilgrimage to Jim

Morrison’s Grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery: The Social Construction of

Sacred Space’, in his Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World, pp.

143-72; P. Hollander, ‘Heaven on Earth: Political Pilgrimages and the

Pursuit of Meaning and Self-Transcendence’, in Redefining Pilgrimage, ed.

Pazos, pp. 71-85.

49 Examples include, K. Schramm, ‘Coming Home to the Motherland:

Pilgrimage Tourism in Ghana’ in Reframing Pilgrimage, pp. 133-49; Basu,

‘Route Metaphors’, in Cultures in Motion; Walter, ‘War Grave

Pilgrimage’; J.B. Gatewood and C.M Cameron, ‘Battlefield Pilgrims at

Gettysburg National Military Park’, in Ethnology, 43.3 (2004): 193-216;

Hollander, ‘Political Pilgrimages’. For the crossover between secular and

religious pilgrimage see, for example, the essays in W.H. Swatos, On the Road to Being There: Studies in Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late Modernity (Leiden, Brill, 2006).

50 For example, A.V. Seaton, ‘Thanatourism: the Final Frontier? Visiting

Cemeteries, Churchyards, Funerary Sites as Sacred and Secular pilgrimage’

in Tourism Recreation Research, 27.2 (2002): 73-81. For cemeteries, see

Shackley, Managing Sacred Sites, pp. 166-9. Also Schramm, ‘Coming

Home to the Motherland’; J. Feldman, ‘Israeli Youth Voyages to Holocaust

Poland: Through the Prism of Pilgrimage’, in Redefining Pilgrimage, ed.

Pazos, pp. 87-101; J. Selby, ‘The Politics of Pilgrimage: The Social

Construction of Ground Zero’ in On the Road, ed. Swatos, pp. 159-85.

Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III 51

51 T. Tatton Brown, ‘Canterbury and the Architecture of Pilgrimage Shrines

in England’, in Pilgrimage: Past and Present, ed. Coleman and Elsner, 90-

107.

52 Maines and Glynn, ‘Numinous Objects’, p. 10. For motives, see P.

Robinson, M. Lück and S.L.J. Smith, Tourism (Wallingford, CABI, 2013),

pp. 235-6.

53 On managing ‘difficult’ sites, see Shackley, Managing Sacred Sites, pp. 157-

73. For the reflection of hegemonic or nationalistic ideals more generally,

see Schouten, ‘Heritage’, p. 25.

54 G. Rinschede, ‘Forms of Religious Tourism’, in Annals of Tourism Research, 19 (1992): 52 (51-67).